Grub on FAT32 partitions?

yaneurabeya · Veteran Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 1754 Location: Seattle

Just wondering if anyone has attempted to put their Grub info (/boot/grub/*) on a FAT32 partition or anything. I'm looking for a decent way of switching between Linux and XP on the fly with scripts and since FAT32 has virtually no security safeguards and all, I'm not sure if it would work.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Dec 17, 2005 10:35 am Post subject:

yaneurabeya,

Well, /boot/grub/fat_stage1_5 exists so it should work.
FAT does not support symbolic links so you need to get your pathnames right.
Sloppy use of an extra /boot in filenames will fail.

You will need to reinstall grub on the MBR to getthe right stage1_5 installed.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

yaneurabeya · Veteran Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 1754 Location: Seattle

Actually, I have a better idea now that I think about it.

Using ext2fsd for Windows, and running the program at system boot, it appears that I might have a chance at solving this simply and easily.

Plan:
1. Create small partition for /boot/grub/ with ext2 (ext3 is not writeable in Windows with ext3).
2. Create short scripts for transitioning between different copies of the grub.conf file.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2005 12:52 pm Post subject:

yaneurabeya,

That will work - although I'm not sure how Windows will see the ext2fs partition.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

yaneurabeya · Veteran Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 1754 Location: Seattle

Well, it appears that between the last version that I used ext2fsd on and now, that write support has become somewhat of a pain. It would be nice though if mkfs -t ext2 didn't automatically try to create a journalled ext2 partition though. I think that's the issue behind the issues that I'm experiencing.

The reason why I'm not doing Fat32 is because Fat32 has absolutely no security capabilities built in, it doesn't support symlinks, and it corrupts files easily

.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2005 12:02 am Post subject:

yaneurabeya,

Thats new You used to need the -j switch to get ext3
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

yaneurabeya · Veteran Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 1754 Location: Seattle

I know. Now I need to create the partition, and use tune2fs -O ^has_journal to get rid of the stupid journal option. Still doesn't let me write in Windows though -_-...

Cintra · Advocate Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 2111 Location: Norway